This page covers custom-written and home-made search engines. Of these entries, only a few people were satisfied with their search engines. Complaints include problems with coverage, duplicates, relevance ranking and speed.

Given these problems, and the number of solid search engines available, whether as commercial products, remote services or open-source code, I recommend against custom search engines.

Custom Search Tools Responses, sorted by rating

rating	how long	date reported	What works well about this search tool?	Any problems or issues with this search tool?
4	3 years	01/2000	-	-
4	2 years	01/2000	Searches all items coming up for sale	not really
4	2 months	02/2000	-	-
4	Don't know	11/1999	Fast	None
3	5 years	08/2001	-	-
3	5 years	08/2000	Relevance ranking	complex queries
3	1 year	06/2001	simple	does not scan docs etc
3	6 months	10/2000	Gets the documents needed	Does not support phonetics etc.
3	3 months	10/2000	all	ok
3	-	10/2001	Fast	No
2	4 years	01/1999	-	speed (possibly due to hardware)
2	3 years	01/2002	Geared to products	Not sufficiently accurate
2	3 years	01/1999	-	-
2	2 years	06/1999	-	-
2	1.5 years	01/2000	returns good set of results	performance not quite as good as needed
2	1 year	02/2002	fast; accurate;	not able to index other file types (Word, PPT, etc)
2	1 year	12/2000	-	-
2	9 months	03/2001	accurate, several options, real-time	too slow
2	8 months	02/2001	its an in-house tool built while deciding what to select	could be better
2	6 months	09/2001	fast	doesn't find all content; no reports; no customizable search results page (targeted ads, links to other resources)
2	6 months	05/2000	easy to read results	results not ranked by relevance
2	6 months	06/1999	Does a simple, keyword-based search.	Users need a full-text search
2	2 months	03/2001	good keyword matching, ranking by relevancy	need natural language search, greater scalability, faster search results
2	1 month	03/2001	search engine	not effcient
2	don't know	09/1999	Gets the results	Somebody installed the code, and nobody here know how to modify it. Want a simpler search mechanism.
2	-	05/2002	-	-
2	25 years	01/2001	fast	compatibility with outside vendors
1	3 years	05/2002	it provides good results	it is much too slow
1	3 years	04/2000	T	It only performs top-level text searches
1	2 years	06/2001	Not a lot	Difficult to find, hard to use, cannot search the content of PDF documents
1	2 years	11/1999	-	too limited, can not do multi-word search
1	2 years	05/1999	-	not specific in returning results; no ability to do advanced searching or modify searches or refine search within a returned set of search results
1	14 months	07/2001	-	We have had many. At this time it isn't working at all. We used this because at the time we were being hosted and could not install any software. We are changing from an NT server to and inhouse UNIX server and I need a search engine that will work with this.
1	1 year	01/2001	it produces results	not designed, sometimes no good relevance
1	6 months	06/2000	it index all site	not accurate searches
1	6 months	03/2000	-	-
1	2 months	01/2000	nothing	too slow, does not find everything it should, returns poor results
1	2 weeks	06/2000	-	doesn't give an adequate order related to relevance to the hits
1	not yet	06/2001	Integrated with TWiki	Does not include: -proximity -phrases -other
1	not yet	10/1999	it was ready on schedule.	result format is minimal and erratic too many duplicates finds pages it shouldn't
1	don't know	04/2002	- Not Applicable -	It cannot index pdf, office files.

July 2002 Survey Results

Sites & Search
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Ratings
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